


Like the paradise found

by foughtyen



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blood and Torture, Everyone wants to hurt Sylvain, F!Ashe, F/M, Firebending & Firebenders, Forgiveness, Implausible water physics, Kissing, M/M, Mad scientist Hilda but make it fashion, Magic, Memory Loss, Non-Consensual Bondage, Non-consensual surgery, Painting, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Sex Toys, This is super cursed I’m sorry, Trans Character, Water Sex, Waterbending & Waterbenders, bending au, poorly-kept secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:46:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25320004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foughtyen/pseuds/foughtyen
Summary: Hanneman's little slip-up helps Ignatz and Hilda in their quests for the perfect pink. They find it in different ways in the same Sylvain Jose Gautier. Lysithea evades accountability, but listens to Ashe in the end.
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert & Lysithea von Ordelia, Sylvain Jose Gautier/Hilda Valentine Goneril, Sylvain Jose Gautier/Ignatz Victor
Kudos: 2





	Like the paradise found

**Author's Note:**

> Ashe isn’t the focus here and that’s kind of a bummer...
> 
> I can't believe this turned out as long as it did-- the original concept of mad scientist Hilda turned into "Hilda's sex dungeon" and then Ignatz showed up. Thanks to Lynn for reading the wips as a captive audience on the train, back in the days when we had a commute.

Hanneman is a scrupulous researcher, yes, but everything that is not an idea caged in his skull can occasionally escape him. 

Take today: an idea crackles through his synapses like the coming storm, but he left his notebook splayed open in his office.

He rushes to page his inspiration, asking frantically for a spare quill and a napkin. They are hard to come by in the lull between lunch and dinner. When none come forth he rushes to his office, leaving his cold soup resting, field notes from Lysithea unrolled beneath his bowl. The last time, he smeared ink on the table in desperation. If only this were an improvement.

Sylvain sits down at the emptied table, legs across the bench. Training ran long and his body screams for food. One need satisfied, his other thirsts bubble up. Thirst for knowledge isn’t the kind that rises first in him, but it’s there. He scans the length of Hanneman’s abandoned parchment and returns it to its original place.

If he knew where its contents would land him, he would have skipped lunch that day. 

Months pass. Snowflakes no bigger than crystals of table salt herald winter’s coming. The weather has been indecisive, wavering above freezing at ground level. Even the dining hall is frigid. The kitchen hogs heat.

Sylvain didn’t dress for the occasion. He shivers in a too-thin scratchy woolen thing whose only shape comes from the bulk of his body inside it.

He pretends to be fine. His fire has a pink tinge to it, which has fascinated Hanneman. He sprouts a heart the size of the bread roll in his other hand and approaches Ashe.

“Hey there, how about we warm each other up? I know you know how.”

A sense of imbalance and danger billows like wind in Ashe’s head. A young hurt around an abyss in her memory. She can feel the scar without knowing the wound, like a phantom limb. 

She remembers seeing Lysithea about something related to this. Warning signs and a fenced-off area before a cliff.

Her face scrunches, like a bad idea on a paper in a fist, flung away. Sylvain will see disgust. He’s used to it.

Her thoughts are an arrow hurtling single-mindedly towards a target. Betrayal, its hurt and sting. She had surrendered her memories to Lysithea for research on the condition she never remember.

So Ashe dumps her soup on Sylvain’s lap.

It’s the anniversary of Lonato’s untimely death at her hands, that much she knows. Every year she counts down the days with increasing dread. Outwardly, she’s dandelion-gentle. Inside, she rampages.

Sylvain picks up the saucer off the floor. No need to get the dining hall staff angry over broken dishware. “What was that for?”

Ashe’s mouth is still, held like a ventriloquist’s. She growls at the bottom of her range. “You read it. You should know.” Anger aligns her brows in a shallow vee. 

Sylvain raises hands of surrender. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

“Lose already. I’m absolutely furious with you.” Her tongue would have split if not tendoned down.

“Aw sure, kitten,” Sylvain calls after her, not knowing when to give up.

Already the space of the ceded memory fills with lightning. There was no way to untie every relevant knot without brutishly slicing some. Ashe said she would rather have that than remember. Their frayed remains prick at her consciousness brightly.

Brown liquid drip-drips over Sylvain’s crotch, down his pant leg. He looks around and, seeing no one looking, dips a finger in it. He licks his lips. Too much pepper.

Lysithea had arrived a tick past three chimes and scolded her wyvern for the delay. The riding lessons she took on the professor’s whim have reaped then-unimagined rewards; she can boomerang between house Ordelia territory to oversee administration and beloved Garreg Mach for bloodwork and research.

Ashe plows moodily out of the dining hall, nearly hitting her. In the time it takes for instinctual apologies to flow into small talk, Lysithea identifies Sylvain has the source of Ashe’s uncharacteristic storm clouds.

Lysithea spies Sylvain’s face in the middle distance and knows something is amiss. A subtle sadness makes him slouch when he does something he knows is wrong. His posture is more contrite than usual, which is not at all.

He waves at her with a trill of his fingers. The motion is there but the vigor is not. How the mighty fall.

In front of her, Ashe raises a fist, not at her. For her. “Why does Sylvain know what happened to me? I told you what I wanted. Discretion.”

“Yes.” A nod from Lysithea. “Discretion that yelling at Sylvain and now me in the dining hall does not afford.”

“How does he know?” Ashe points at him with too much ire for a single digit. Her fist blooms, all five fingers ready to snap at him.

“The condition was for me to never tell you. The only way he could have found out is if Hanneman told him somehow. In any case, that oaf,” her eyes dart at Sylvain, “is his own person, so I have violated no— oh, that’s not helping right now.”

“No, it’s not.” The taste of berries and cream floats to her tongue and she doesn’t know why. The exposed innards of memories half-retained now spark as too many nerves fire at once. 

“Maybe this will ease things.” She draws a sigil in the air. Ashe’s fist glows, wreathed in fizzy purple flames. “Have at ‘im.”

“I won’t fire-bend. I don’t fire-bend. I haven’t forgotten that much.” Ashe dusts the flames with disgust, insulted Lysithea would offer the very arms she’d vehemently laid down. Her swatting fingers pass through the plasma unblemished.

“It’s magic, not bending.” Lysithea scoffs. Attaching herself to technicality is a life raft. “Go ahead and relieve yourself. He’s wronged you.”

Ashe shakes her head. “Why does he deserve this any more than you or Hanneman? Not on my oath.”

“Very well.” As Sylvain slumps in relief, Lysithea clasps the sigil and reclaims the flames before Ashe takes them with her to wherever she goes to deal with this.

Lysithea punches him herself. Her physical blows most resemble a gust of wind, but it’s the emotional letting that matters. The alternative, a magic punch, would blast a hole through Sylvain and anyone in his direction, so this is merciful. It still catches him by surprise. He thought himself spared.

“Ow...” he pouts, rubbing his face even though it doesn’t hurt. Crocodile tears have always come easy.

“You idiot. Why did you do that?” She speaks to Sylvain and looks to the heavens, her ghost-white hair a straight icefall down her back.

In her imagination the goddess peers down from a cloud and, smirking, hollers divinely across the distance. Her divine voice resounds. “Did you expect anything different?” Touché, goddess.

“I’m not dealing with this right now.” She traces a circle in the air in Sylvain’s direction to designate him. He cowers in the quarter of a second he thinks it’s a sigil.

She puts her money where her mouth is and orders a slice of the cake of the day, white chocolate raspberry. Scrupulous eyes would notice she doesn’t pay. 

Lysithea skims funding for the cake from her research account, but no one needs to know. The monastery bakers are happier with heavier pockets, like Lysithea is happier with cake. Graft is hardly objectionable when it’s delicious.

Today she stares down a vanilla cake with white chocolate ganache. Two brilliant strings of raspberry jelly run perfectly parallel at the thirds.

Ignatz arrives at the table with too many sketchbooks tucked in his armpits and tea on a saucer.

“Hello Ignatz,” she acknowledges her classmate cautiously, wary of his posturing towards her cake, which she does not intend to share.

Ignatz holds supplicant’s hands towards it, adoringly. “I’ve been searching for a red pigment like that... such a rich color. Plant-based pigmentation, is this it?”

Of course Ignatz would make it something artsy. She needn’t have felt threatened. 

With no fanfare she mercilessly vivisects the cake, driving her fork perpendicularly to the layers. Her priority is to luxuriate in the cake flesh melting on her tongue.

Satisfied, she swallows. “Consider, however, using it as pigment would quickly attract unsettling insects and mold. Your pieces would be ruined.”

“That can be explained as a commentary on how beauty is temporary, and then even grotesque! People who understand art would get it.” Ignatz sips his tea. “Ephemerality is beautiful.”

“People who understand sweets would be _appalled_. Your words disguise what’s still a tragic waste of cake.” Lysithea protectively shovels another bite into her mouth. “I think you would be better served looking into channels that are less _organic_.”

Ignatz doesn’t answer. The doors burst open and Hanneman rushes in, coattails flaring behind him in a breeze from his own velocity, flustered. He huffs with urgency, “I heard reports of a commotion in the dining hall, where is it, is anyone hurt?”

Lysithea’s shoulders swell in a naive shrug. “All good, professor.”

“Then why is the one with pink flames rubbing the beginning of a bruise?”

“Hey, I have a name,” Sylvain caws.

“I’ll use healing water, it’s fine.” Lysithea casts a longing glance at her cake, hoping Hanneman gets the hint.

She peers into Sylvain’s cup. “What’s in here?”

“Apple juice.”

“Don’t sound disappointed, it’s close enough.” She cracks her knuckles. “And you’ll smell good afterwards.”

“Very well, do be careful. And I take it none of you have seen my keys?” Hanneman makes careful eye contact with Ignatz and Sylvain, their returned glances devoid of recognition. “I thought not.” He turns stiltedly and leaves.

Lysithea guides a blob of juice through the air and lands it on Sylvain’s purpling cheek. As she concentrates, it glows softly over his skin, restoring a gentle pallor. 

Purpose served, it plops back into the cup under her coaxing. Sylvain rushes to inspect the ex-wound with his fingers. He touches his cheekbone gingerly. “Thanks.”

“I’m erasing evidence, nothing more.” She pokes him in the stomach. “Don’t drink the juice though. It’ll taste rancid.”

“Yeah no, I’m done eating.” He walks away shaking his head.

Hilda fills the seat Sylvain flows out of. She carefully cuts some kind of heavily seasoned meat on her plate and thrusts her fork in it to the tines’ end. On her face perches a smile belonging to a child who enjoyed burning ants under magnifying glasses. The steak leaves a small puddle of gravy and blood. Rare.

“Hilda, just who I wanted to see.” Lysithea smiles, forced and unconvincing. “You like pink, right? Ignatz is looking for some too. You two should talk.”

Lysithea again entreats the goddess above. “Will I ever get to eat my cake in peace?” Hopefully the goddess deals in passive-aggressive prayers. Holding her cake plate with two cautious hands, she finds a new seat at the next table over, one with fewer distractions.

Some of the goddess’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

“I know Sylvain has pink fire, but he’s such a pain in the tit.” Hilda’s voice carries far. Lysithea wonders whether Sylvain can hear what she’s saying. Hilda probably doesn’t care.

“Why don’t you take care of him?” Sweets-deprived, Lysithea tucks away another forkful in her cheek.

“That sounds like something that takes _effort_ ,” Hilda gags.

Lysithea points a finger, guru-esque. “It’s obvious. The fastest way to Sylvain’s heart is through his pants. I would weaponize my ...assets if I had any he’d respond to, but mine are concentrated elsewhere.”

Hilda chuckles. “You’re not hot enough, so little bombshell me should play a pair of walking boobies to teach Sylvain a lesson, is that what you’re saying?”

“Put that way, it sounds so crude.” A bite of pure frosting on her tongue counteracts Lysithea’s sour scowl.

Hilda cuts a cube of meat and spears it so vigorously the utensils clink, grating scratchy against the porcelain. While she chews, she tables her silverware, cracks her knuckles and locks eyes with Lysithea. Only half-covering a mouth full of half-chewed food, she says, _watch this_.

Hilda pushes up her tits, making it look careless. Ignatz’s eyes follow. She smirks, jutting her chin at Lysithea, who claps. _You’re right, and they come to me like flies to honey_.

“Iggy, my eyes are up here. But if you get to thinking the goddess looks like me, I won’t be mad.”

Ignatz’s face turns a perfect pink. He talks through it. Perhaps usefulness can override embarrassment.

“If we’re talking about Sylvain,” he interjects timidly, with an air of inevitability befit a praying mantis groom. “He really pissed off Ashe right before you got here. Said something about fire bending? It’s hard to make her mad, so maybe he deserves it. Just a little.”

“Yes, that may have been my fault.” Lysithea explains her predicament, with careful emphasis on how none of it is directly her fault.

Hilda touches a fingertip to her lips, overplaying surprise. “Oooh, so this is Hanneman’s responsibility, but you want me to punish the horndog of House Gautier instead.”

Lysithea pouts. “Don’t say it like that. Of course I favor Hanneman. He’s always acknowledged my competence. Sylvain has just ogled me. Yech.”

Hilda teeter-totters, her twin ponytails swaying like pendulums. “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I just wanted to double check.”

“Check and mate, yes. Now excuse me, I _really_ need to assess the quality of the monastery’s cake.” She needs a new excuse.

Hilda holds out a pinky. Her precise magenta nails are tipped, seem to drip rouge. Lysithea curls her own, stubby cuticles plain, around it.

*

Hilda unlocks what amounts to a spacious supply closet and escorts Ignatz inside with an impatient wave. His hands are full and his steps choppy, arrhythmic. In his embrace: an easel, several canvases, sketchbooks, a pallet, and brushes fight in different directions against the ties that bundle them. 

“So glad you’re joining me. It’s great to have someone to split the work. You can set up in here.” Hilda offers no help but her company.

Expecting nothing more, Ignatz lights some candles, wets his paints and engrosses himself in his work, the second panel in a triptych of statues of the goddess found in each of the Fódlan territories’ capital cities. 

Each face is a blank, not for lack of trying. The canvases are scraped thin where he has struggled to capture beauty.

Minutes or hours later—time is a suggestion and an ooze when Ignatz finds a sweet spot—Hilda laboriously pushes the door open once more. 

Uncharacteristic gasps culminate in a shriek-grunt as she kicks Sylvain forward and rushes to lock the door. He has a rucksack tied over his head, a separate ribbon tied tight around his neck. The wet-dirt smell of potatoes lingers in the burlap.

Ignatz’s muse flies off into the ether. The spell is broken and reality sets in. He examines his surroundings. Jars full of embryos, organs, pieces-parts of once-life crowd the shelves. 

Hilda pulls the bow and unsacks Sylvain, pushing him back with nothing but audacious steps piercing his personal space. He ebbs, she flows. They dance like this until she corners him, the back of his thighs bumping against a long table. A nervous smile flickers across his face.

“So, pinks, I’m guessing you don’t want to kiss me after all?”

“No, I will, just a sec.”

All panic melts into lusty enthusiasm. “Wait, really?”

She traces behind his ear with a light finger, guiding the roll of his neck down toward her. It’s not her best work, but instinct tells her Sylvain is a quantity over quality kind of guy. She leaves him woozy, wanting more.

She lets one hand rest carelessly on his chest. “See, I keep my promises. Now lie down so I can get a better angle.”

She’d never admit it, but those lips are soft enough to start rumors. As she suckles them again, she pushes gently down at his shoulders. He reclines leisurely, like a shadow moving across a sun dial. 

“Stupid boy.”

She clasps a piece of metal shaped like a croquet hoop around Sylvain’s neck and fastens it to waiting components in the surface behind him. He tugs at it with a white-knuckled grip to no avail.

“Ignatz, hey buddy, what’s happening here?” His bargaining turns to whimpering as he bangs fists against the table.

“Some lessons you learn the hard way. I’m just here to paint,” Ignatz shrugs, washing his hands in a side sink.

Hilda lifts water from Ignatz’s paints and his still-wet hands. The droplets swirl with diluted pigment. “No need to be wasteful.”

She works it into a small ball. Density will let her play with details. She divides it and drops a half at Sylvain’s wrists. One end spreads along his forearm, where it sheaths the skin. The other end extends tendrils towards his palm.

Sylvain’s fingers twitch to call fire. Hilda kisses him again, denying the air he needs to bend, and pushes his hands flat with her own. Their fingers lace together. He groans enjoyment if not accession. Boys are so easy. Boring.

Locking lips buys time for her water lace to completes a web over his palms, capping the fingers. She watches him try to move against his restraints. The intent of motion is there; the real thing is not. Success.

“Hah, are all the deer this, uh, kinky?” Sylvain raises his eyebrows, cool and laidback. Sweat beading on his forehead, shining on his nose tells otherwise.

Ignatz raises his hand to object. A hint of disappointment quivers in his voice. “I’m not.”

Sylvain closes his eyes and shakes his head back and forth, rusty locks on the table. Skin on his neck catches against his new metal collar. “Right, right, you’d do missionary position with the goddess. I mean, what would you even be converting her to?”

Hilda shakes with laughter, graceless, snorting, genuine. “You’re funny when you’re scared.”

“I’m also really hard right now.” He shakes his legs, sending a rattle through the table. “Ignatz, come on, tell me this is just foreplay or something. What’s your role here?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, really.” Ignatz can do nothing to stop the blaze across his face but focus on the statue of Seiros at the cathedral in Fhirdiad. Fate chose a terrible time for him to work on the statue’s modest bronze bosom.

“Iggy, you don’t need to talk to the subject unless I tell you to, got it?” Hilda spreads Sylvain’s legs herself and whips up much cruder water restraints for his ankles. Until someone comes along adept at bending with their toes, it’s just not worth the effort.

“And voilà! _Now_ we can start the foreplay!” After donning gloves, she undoes Sylvain’s belt, humming.

She grabs Sylvain’s cock. He presses desperately into her hand, so she releases it.

“Wait, first, lipstick. To make the color pop!” With her hand she mimes _pop_.

She opens her mouth wide, a red ring like a target, and moves down his body, shaking her head each time. She grazes his lips, not enough to leave anything behind. His neck, his nipple, down his side, the phantom sensations accruing in a frustrated static. At last she pauses over his glans, staring down his slit. She blinks first.

“Just kidding!” she puts a mask over her lips, covering her handiwork in a pastel pink cloth. To Sylvain’s aroused bewilderment she explains, “I know I’m cute and that’s what matters.”

“Iggy, can you paint with this?” She swipes a tear of precum into a vial and hands it to Ignatz, who takes it with a toneless _thanks_ and mumbles something about a lacquer or a binding agent.

“Just let me fuck something already,” Sylvain whines, his hips rocking.

“Ignatz has a mouth he’s not using,” Hilda suggests, “but since you’re okay with _things_ , I have something more fun.”

Ignatz sets his current painting aside. He with unwanted thoughts of skin and bodies and how they move. No way would he tarnish the likeness of the goddess with such uncleanliness. He covers the canvas with a cloth. Even as a statue, her eyes would see through him and into the tangle of eros and guilt. 

With no other outlet for discharging the well of impurities that overflows within him, he does what he knows how. He pops the vial Hilda gave him and mixes it into his best pink.

On a new canvas, he sets to sketching Sylvain. When the eye gifts you with references, you use them. 

Hilda fills several buckets with water while cooing to Sylvain, stroking a knuckle along his healed cheek. From the separate shallow wells rises a new creation. What takes shape looks like Hilda, a doublet in mannerisms and space. Broad sweeps of the real Hilda’s arms and fine tweaks with her fingers bring life to the transparent puppet.

“I know what this needs.” Ignatz daubs touches of his best pink all over the watery figure. They dissolve with his inhibitions. His brush pays attention to detail across its lips, beneath its tits and in its taint. once inside, the pigments swirl until the whole being is a meek pink. Meek, not modest.

Hilda cackles with delight, a grin wide on her face. She seems to be dancing with an invisible partner to bring the water doll through the air. It positions itself over, then sits squarely on Sylvain’s impatient cock.

She watches, curious and amused. Sylvain thrusts desperately into it, his grunts playing metronome for the rhythm of his hips.

The doll massages his chest, fingers rolling skin and muscle, careful to stroke his nipples, his armpits, the underside of his chin.

The pitch of his moans rises and the outs of his breath threaten to merge with the ins. Hilda makes space for herself and straddles his torso, her knees bumping his biceps.

“Are you even trying to be a good fuck?” She juts her hips towards his face. The human smell missing from the doll floods in, thick on her hidden skin. “You talk so sweetly, your tongue oughta be good.”

He opens his mouth as he nears climax, a flood of breath rushing out. stars spangle the back of his eyelids, shut light.

“Already?”

“My tongue still works.” Sylvain closes his eyes and opens his mouth again.

“Oh, you thought you were gonna get this? Nope! No boys allowed!” She leans back into the comfort of her creation’s breasts, lazily fingering herself and sighing as Sylvain shudders with orgasm.

As he recovers, she rolls herself off, stands up, and disassembles the doll. Water splatters unceremoniously in buckets, around buckets, onto the floor. Hilda’s care goes to isolating the floating strings of ejaculate into a milky paste, delivered to Ignatz, and collecting the pink pigment that tinted the doll’s volume. That, she keeps for herself.

“That was the weirdest fuck I’ve ever had, but I’m not mad about it. And Iggy, thanks for your part.”

“Don’t call me that,” Ignatz bleats. Despite the protests, he loses a heartbeat when Sylvain winks at him.

Hilda rolls out a covered cart. “Orgasms are so relaxing, right? Now you’ll be relaxed when the real fun begins.”

“Round two? Are you trying to top what just happened? Okay, I can be adventurous. Give me fifteen minutes.”

Hilda unveils the contents of the cart like a server removing a cloche from a dessert: an assortment of axe heads, each with cursive H V G separated by little hearts.

“This is round two,” she announces momentously.

Nervous laughter ripples from Sylvain’s mouth. “Are you gonna stick the end knob up my ass or something? Pretend to cut my throat?” He’s starting to get hard again.

Hilda ignores his great suggestions. “Other people use special knives for this sort of thing, but I know the secret is to just be careful. Although… they don’t have bending to clean up any _unfortunate_ messes.”

Sylvain struggles against his restraints. Where the doll had been soft, supple, the threads of water do not yield. “Ignatz, what the _fuck_. How can you stand there and let her do this!?”

Sylvain lifts his shoulders from the table. They make eye contact, his pleading; Ignatz’s remorseful. Together their gazes drift to the assortment of blades. Fear of pain is a strong motivator.

“So sorry,” Ignatz mouths. “I didn’t know.”

A drawn out _hmmm_ forms in Hilda’s throat while her fingers spider over the axes, indecisive. These are the ivories for her beautiful tune, although her main instrument will be the body. She picks a small one, petite as to almost be cute.

She picks a spot an inch beneath his wrist. The silver blade dips beneath the film of water that holds it in place.

Sylvain screams when she presses the edge to his skin, then screams more at the silence of his nerves. The cut is clean. A minute seam of blood clouds the water, as if the cut had been made against air, and only the first drops collected before the blood had changed its mind and returned to the habit of its vein.

Ignatz is no stranger to blood, having spilled plenty in battle. He never envisions sharing in Hilda’s nonchalance. Yet here, the precision, the deliberation behind Hilda’s cut in Sylvain’s forearm, his rattling scream piles on. All of it is too much gut-cramping and teeth-clenching revulsion to stomach.

Ignatz covers his canvas. “I can’t do this anymore. This is too weird. Start talking. Start talking now!” He points a paintbrush at Hilda. The bristles sag ineffectually under the weight of water and pigment. 

Hilda’s face is expressionless, didactic. “This is how you get the pink, Sylvain gets a fuck, and I get the guts! Win-win-win!”

“Guts?” Ignatz and Sylvain shout-ask in unison.

Hilda’s free hand cards through Sylvain’s hair. “Don’t worry. Not much, just some little muscles you don’t even need! You won’t even notice it’s missing.”

Sylvain vainly shakes Hilda’s hands out of his hair. “Excuse you, I need all of them.”

“I’ve done my reading and it turns out, you really don’t. Now stop shaking or you’ll mess up your restraints and _really_ feel something.”

She makes a parallel incision in his wrist and connects the two, peeling back the skin and fatty tissue like window shutters. From the flesh beneath, a length of sinew ending in a bulb of muscle is all she needs. More quick cuts and they’re hers.

“Your pink. Here. I think the perfect shade is where the muscle meets the tendon. Dry it out and grind it up with your pigments.”

The plump end is for Ignatz. He retreats from her offering hand, repelled like the wrong end of a magnet. Witnessing is one thing. She locked him in, after all. But touching the ill-gotten results adds another layer of perverse intimacy with Sylvain. That might be worse than later allegations of abetting.

A rattle at the door and Ignatz pauses. Hilda slips the slimy bit between his fingers and he hurls it onto the pallet, his instinct to get rid of it.

Hilda rearranges her axe heads by size on the cart. “I want to see you use it.”

Persuaded more by the axe in her hand and its siblings on the cart than any artistic desire, he wets a new brush against the bloody tendon and mixes it into one side of his previous, almost-there pink.

“Where is it going? Where you put it on water-me? The goddess must have a beautiful--”

“I don’t paint those things.” Ignatz has never been a skilled liar; his posture curls away from Hilda in a him-sized tell. To recover, he injects truth, “not here anyway.”

“I’m waiting, Iggy.”

“Fine, fine!” He delicately lifts the veil from his canvas. Just a dab is all he needs. “There, I’ve used it.”

“That’s it.” Hilda’s voice is most frightening at its flattest.

“It was enough... and I-- it should really dry first.”

Hilda sets her blade down quietly and paces towards Ignatz with her most boy-eating posture.

“You don’t appreciate what I’ve done for you. You don’t deserve it.”

She changes her mind about the axe, gripping it and lunging towards him. It snags the canvas instead, shredding a pencil sketch of Sylvain’s musculature down the midline.

“Oh. Oooh Ignatz.” Hilda belly laughs. “You used it on his cheeks? You modest bore. At least spend it on the lips.”

Hilda lifts the ruined painting, the torn middle flapping like his guts hanging open. She presents it to Sylvain. “Look what Ignatz and I made. He put the pink on your _cheeks_. Well, what do you think?”

For once, Sylvain can think of nothing to say, his mouth cakey with terror. The implication of the ripped middle is not lost on him. His eyes dart around the painting, at the version of him Ignatz has created. On the canvas, Sylvain’s enraptured cheeks glow seductively, his lip spread to greet something left to the imagination. Goddess forgive Ignatz for creating it. At last he finds laughter. “I look like I’m having a real fun time. And is my dick really that big?” 

Hilda carries on the conversation she wanted to have. “Who cares about the cheeks, the lips are what make or break a face. No one says, _oh, I wish her cheeks were rosier_.”

Ignatz clutches his paintbrush to his chest, greatly miffed. “Well I do!” His chest heaves with breath. “You know nothing about beauty, nothing about—”

Hilda turns her toes to face him and he quiets. She takes a step toward him and he flinches. “I know more about beauty than you can imagine. While you rehash blushing maidens and... whatever he is, I’m using crested flesh to create powerful fashion. The crest weapons took whole skeletons to make, but we can do better with less.”

 _Monster_ forms on Ignatz’s lips.

“Who, me? I see your fear. I smell it, thick and trembling. Heck, I _taste_ it. You ungrateful rat. Fine!”

Ignatz backs against the wall, his shoulder blades bumping into jar-lined shelves. Insides liquefying with fear, Ignatz tightens his concentration and grabs a glass-bound specimen. It arcs lumbering through the air and shatters at Hilda’s feet. 

Her stockings drip with formaldehyde. A mass of flesh, hematic and veiny, rolls across the floor with residual momentum.

Hilda whistle-shrieks. “My brother sent me this fabric!” She hurls an axe head at Ignatz. He ducks, losing his balance, falling to his knees. When his weight is off his palms as he stands, she tackles him. His head hits the wooden shelves with a hard whack. Jars jingle. Ignatz slumps.

“Finally, some quiet.” Hilda whispers to herself. “Ugh, I need to change. Don’t move, boys.”

Sylvain closes his eyes and prays. If he’s silent, Hilda might forget. It works, insofar as she doesn’t come for him next.

She smooths her skirt against her thighs, tutting critically at how the pleats rest. A loose thread. Puffs of her breath, the smell of smoke. Tumblers turn. The beginnings of cold pry in as her footsteps decrescendo.

Sylvain is alone in the mildewy dark. He doesn’t remember seeing blood on the surfaces behind Ignatz, so he should be alive. Sylvain is willing to believe whatever optimistic thing prevents him from being in a room with a corpse.

When the spike of adrenaline dulls and the sweat cools to sticky grime, it’s frigid in this part of the castle. His family would laugh at how soft he’s gotten. It’s nowhere near as cold as a Sreng winter. What’s a little gooseflesh to a Gautier?

He thinks of Miklan, skipped by both bending and crests. When Miklan left him in the snow, there was no way to know that Sylvain would summon fire and warm himself of pine needles and twigs.

Afterwards, Miklan’s face had warped with rage when he realized he had given the older Gautier generations another thing to celebrate.

The lead-up was hours of shivering. Frozen tears, body muted by cold. When he most believed he was going to die, he lay down in the snow and watched flakes fall from the blinding white sky. He believed there was a sliver of chance he could later be found and thawed if it would bury him completely. Instead, he melted a circle through it, down to the mat of pine needles below.

It does fuck-all now. He can’t draw fire with his hands restrained, and never learned to breathe it. By the time he was old enough to learn fire-bending by mouth, he was hard-set on using his for other things. The possibility of accidentally summoning sparks at the wrong time wasn’t worth that knowledge.

Miklan would have loved to see him like this. Not the part where he fucked a facsimile of his friend, but the part where he was lured in by promises of a kiss that no one never believed would happen.

This is what it’s like to be a wick in the air with no spark.

Ignatz startles to life. his voice is a cautious whisper. “Sylvain, are you— alive? is she gone?”

“Aah shit, Iggy!” Sylvain rattles in his fetters. Real tears of relief bead in his eyes.

“I’m. Still here! That really happened. Hilda. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck? And you’re missing a part of you and— Oh my goddess I’m so sorry I had no idea she would take it from you, the piece of...”

“I’m just numb.” Sylvain laughs to himself. “I feel nothing, physical or mental. My skin must be really thick.”

It’s most natural to lie about remembering Miklan. Some burdens are best carried alone, having folded and molded to the shape of their bearer. He did nearly forget that he had one less muscle. That fact’s texture is too surreal. It’s strangely easy to forget without feeling. Nothing feels out of place.

“Hey Iggy, can you light a candle? It would be nice to be out of here before she gets back.”

“I have nothing in here that can do that.” A peal of laughter rings in the dark. No other reaction wields the absurdity of the situation so well. “But wait. You can.”

“Get these water things off me and I can.”

“Right, right. Okay.” Ignatz gropes around, first on his knees, his hands tapping lightly. 

“Good going, you found my leg. But I found it first.” They both force chuckles.

“Oh. Okay. Oh goddess no.” Quick decisions are poor decisions: Ignatz’s fingers touch the exposed underside of Sylvain’s skin. His insides churn at the wet sensation, a recoil he feels in his teeth. “It’s fine, um. The water is antiseptic.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t feel it? Oh, well that makes sense. It’s also an anesthetic.”

Ignatz taps around the watery filaments crisscrossing Sylvain’s palms. Hilda’s bending is delicate, full of hearts and designs she probably first saw in lace. despite this, her construction is durable.

“ _Hilda_ making _me_ unaesthetic? Impossible!” Sylvain leaves time for a reaction he can’t see. “I’m kidding, I know what anesthetic means. just trying to take some pressure off.”

“I’m gonna need you to be quiet so I can concentrate on closing you up and getting you out.” Ignatz snaps with more bark than he means to.

Sylvain has never quieted so quickly. 

Ignatz is alone with his own shaky breathing and breakneck heartbeat. He was nervous when he learned to bend, but that was fear of failure. The existential dread he confronts now is of his own mortality. His brain turns the merest suggestion of a sound into the specter of Hilda’s footsteps approaching.

He treats Sylvain’s arm like a messy bed, first folding down the surface skin and pressing it flat. Murmured words will close the cut without the slightest scar. Then it’s a matter of waiting on the water.

With little to do in the near-dark, his eyes play tricks. He thinks he sees the glint of Sylvain’s eyes, copper, or a nice milk chocolate. Maybe he does. The contour of his jaw is much less likely there, but filled in by Ignatz’s imagination.

Some people’s healing water glows with the radiance of life restored. Not Ignatz’s. He fusses in the dark. It’s less efficient, using Sylvain’s whole forearm as the target instead of the cut that Hilda created. He _could_ find them by feeling around, but that’s not the part of Sylvain he wants to know more about.

Using magic to would have kept his mind occupied. Concentrating on the shape of the sigil keeps his mouth quiet, save for soft grunts of exertion.

Instead, while his hands hover over the healing wound, Ignatz blurts out, “I didn’t know you liked being tied up.”

If only he’d waited another two seconds. Hilda’s water traps come undone with a quiet _drip, drip_ and splatter as the components fall to gravity.

Pink flames burst to life in Sylvain’s hands, where his lifelines intersect. warm and alive. Now, they’re mood lighting illuminating Ignatz’s guilty stare. The pomegranate blush hides in the soft light.

Ignatz’s gaze dangles a heavy chain. He could look away from Sylvain’s throat, where his adam’s apple juts out like a knife, or he could cherish the moments left before he looks up and meets Sylvain’s eyes. Every second is another great one to be alive.

So Ignatz yelps when Sylvain tips his chin with a pinky. Not even the whole digit, just a fingertip and a suggestion. For a moment it’s cold—it sends chill through him that dissipates with a single shiver, no match for the furnace chugging in Ignatz’s cheeks.

Ignatz expected all sorts of moods to gather round Sylvain’s irises— judgment, seduction, haughtiness, threaded in the iridescent ring of muscle. What he finds is passion, a honey-rich baklava to the usual single-layer of shallow, affected panty-chasing.

Energy becomes action. Sylvain’s hands blaze through Ignatz’s hair, lightly damp on his scalp. He nibbles at Ignatz’s lips in lazy exploration. Each single kiss is clumsy, but together the impression they give of petals across his mouth resolves into a new relief.

Sylvain pushes him away, only far enough to slip words between them. “It’s a little late now, but you weren’t saving yourself for the goddess, were you? Like. Just wanna make sure.”

“Um. you’ll do.” Ignatz rushes to say.

He turns his attention to the collar at Sylvain’s neck, where his adam’s apple hides. The prospect of closer contact pounds in his mind. The prospect of Hilda’s return pounds louder. Did she have a key?

Ignatz has his fingers curled around the band of iron, appraising its strength, when a sheath of pink flame envelops him. 

“Shit shit shit, fire!” He recoils, startling himself into the jar-lined wall. They jingle but don’t fall.

Sylvain’s kisses suck air. Ignatz swats at his clothes in heavy-handed pats but their tongues stay gathered.

Sylvain catches Ignatz’s palms and holds steady until some of his panic dissipates. “Shhhh, shhhh. You’re okay.”

“I’m okay!” Ignatz parrots, not okay. “I’m... I’m...” The flames’ shimmer seems no less a threat.

“Oh goddess, this is embarrassing.” Sylvain says, “This happens when I get excited. It’s harmless, I promise.”

Ignatz’s shoulders slump to rest. “Can you turn it off? Don’t, if you can—I just wanted to know. It’s fascinating.” He touches the wick of an ordinary candle and it springs to life, casting a weak, jaundiced light. He finds more, and soon the room is passably lit.

Sylvain’s hair is messy from where Ignatz’s hands rowed through it. “Not everyone has harmless fire, but I do. I _can_ , anyway. impressive, right?” Pearly whites flash in Sylvain’s smile.

Ignatz pushes his glasses up his nose, glowing with new confidence. “All sparkle and no substance.”

Sylvain blushes. “Hey, that’s not fair!”

“It won’t matter what you can do if Hilda comes back before we figure something out!”

As if spoken into existence, from outside comes the crackle of magic and thick smell of ozone. Ignatz stands in front of Sylvain, arms wide, stomach tensed, ready to be brave.

He doesn’t have to.

Lysithea bursts through a doorway freed of its door. What remains of the molten hinges melts in goopy drops into the doorframe. Light from the outside stretches her shadow across the floor. Ashe is behind her, lockpicking tools in hand.

“What the sugar-coated heck is going on here?” Her glare cuts across the room to Sylvain’s carrot top. “So this is where Hanneman’s missing keys walked off to.”

Ashe treads gingerly in behind her, scouring the floor for clues. Her boots crunch on glass. She tosses a skeptical glance to Lysithea. “Is this what Hilda said she would do?”

“She said she could _take care of_ Sylvain.” Ignatz swallows.

A slow understanding of betrayal creeps across Sylvain’s face. His mouth, opened to join the confusion around Hilda, turns to a snarl. “ _She cut me open with an axe_.” His teeth clench as he chews on the new disappointment. Ignatz had said Sylvain would learn a lesson and had known the lesson would be loss. For the first time in a long while he wishes for an undo on a kiss.

Still, speak of the devil and she appears.

“Hilda _is_ going to take care of Sylvain,” her voice shines brightly behind them.

“She did this!” Ignatz points. “She locked us in here!”

“Did what, Ignatz?” Hilda singsongs. “Gosh, I really thought you were interested in beauty and not cheap dick.”

“I did _not_ fuck him.” Sylvain yells, kneejerk.

Ignatz’s bigger quarrel is with Hilda. “From the beginning you never cared about what I was doing. at every point along the way you belittled me. I’m done with you.” He kicks over his easel to demonstrate his rage. Hilda cackles.

In the chaos Ashe passes unnoticed to Sylvain. He doesn’t appreciate her frown of inevitability she wears while assessing him.

“Everyone, shut your sweets-forsaken mouths!” Lysithea bellows.

“I don’t think I fucking will. This is my domain.” Hilda has an axe in her hand and wields it as naturally as a breeze through the air.

“Try me.” Lysithea draws a magic circle in the air. One by one, searing spears of violet energy phase into existence over Hilda, a colossal crown of thorns. 

“ _You_ try _me_!” Hilda smashes a jar whose contents sizzle against the tiles in the floor. In an instance the room is sparsely dotted, filled with a lattice of droplets hanging in the air. Each a couple inches apart from the next, they form a perfect grid. “Move and burn.”

Neither moves, threatened by the other’s weapon looming. It takes concentration to maintain the magic and the bending as they are.

Ashe pokes at Sylvain’s collar. A ball of acid hangs close. It would be interesting to move it, but she has nothing that can both guide it toward the metal and ensure that it doesn’t slide off and eat into Sylvain.

“We’re getting you out of here.” Ashe swallows a flavor of guilt that comes with hindsight. Had she maintained her calm veneer through the end of her meal, the dominoes that brought Sylvain and Ignatz into this fever dream wouldn’t have collided.

“You’re a great lockpick, so you can just crack me out.” Sylvain says, careful not to gesture into a burn.

Ashe checks again. “There’s no keyhole and no time. I’m going to bend you out.” Pain shimmers behind her forehead as she says it. Missing notes in a song she knows she knows.

“What? No! I know what that means. I read the stupid letter, okay? And now I want to forget it. Just like you.”

Ashe glares daggers at Sylvain. He knows nothing, has learned nothing. It doesn’t matter.

She digs deep. The clot of emotion from killing Lonato hasn’t subsided over time. It always floats just below the surface as a cautionary reminder. Lysithea couldn’t take that away from her.

She considers the thought of bending, the actual trickle of electrical impulse from head to hand, and shakes with nausea. 

She said she would, so she will. It was in defense of a life, Christophe’s, that she took a life, Lonato’s, so bending to save Sylvain would be... at the very least, not a strike in the wrong direction.

She calls her fire. It’s a trickle at first. Her control is rough. She notices the acid points shrink when her flames touch them. Useful knowledge.

She clears a path for herself to lean over Sylvain and work.

When her hand glows near Sylvain’s neck, he swallows. “Careful, I need that. Some of my biggest assets—”

Navigating her arm around the droplets, Ashe clamps a hand over Sylvain’s mouth and creates a joyful silence. She hisses, “I swore an oath to do everything in my power to help people. The power still belongs to me, whether I’ve used it or not. This is for my knighthood, not for your life.”

Sylvain gulps.

It’s done quickly. The metal turns molten in her fingers and yields like taffy. Its new white-hot skin cools quickly. 

The urge to mourn grabs her by the nape. She puts a hand on her neck. A drop of acid floats there as if waiting. Her skin sings dissonantly. She wills the pain distant. “Ignatz!” she shouts louder than her hand stings. “hold up what you can.”

“Got it!” Nothing changes in Ignatz’s posture. His fingers tense, his brow furrows. The regularity of the pattern is a small reprieve; the number of separate drops is a challenge.

Sylvain sends a wild pulse of flame through the entire room. Pink feathers dance like a nebula through a cold space of acid stars.

Choosing between her concentration and her life, Hilda drops low beneath the arms of fire. The lattice shivers in the moment her focus falls but Ignatz holds its droplets static. Around Lysithea he clears room for larger movements.

“We’re not going to hurt you.” Lysithea offers diplomatically. “I want you to join me.”

Hilda scoffs, offended. “you invited me to do something and then barged in midway. Why should I join you on your terms when you can’t do anything but threaten me?

“It wasn’t beautiful, Hilda.” Ignatz says, more to convince himself. On his tongue rests the excuse that there was still something so captivating about it.

“You didn’t see what I could have created.” Her tongue is thick in her throat, voice quivering. “Isn’t it tragic, Iggy? Never seeing your creation come to life, even though you know how beautiful it could be. It breaks my fucking heart.”

Ignatz looks to the remains of his canvas, slashed and burned. All it evokes in him is guilt.

Lysithea reaches towards her diplomatically, palm up. “Hilda. Research crest monsters with me. Don’t cut up your classmates.”

“What she said. Please don’t.” Sylvain chimes in, unsolicited.

Hilda reaches upwards, fingertips flirting with the surface of Lysithea’s dark spikes. “How do I know you’re going to do what you say you will?”

Lysithea slams the dark spikes into the ground around Hilda. They slide into the stone without cracking it, like knives into flesh.

Lysithea isn’t a gambling type. She understands likelihood and probability. Creating weakness can beget strength. “I know what you want. I can get it for you a different way. Both of you, let them fall.”

Ignatz pulls the cart of axe heads away from Hilda and Lysithea. He trusts neither with anything sharp but words. Only then does he let the drops fall. Hilda shows open palms in accession. She wouldn’t call it surrender.

An unceremonious splatter fills the room. Acid rain hisses as it eats shallow divots across the floor.

“Hmm, I’m still pretty sad because I didn’t get some things I wanted today. But there’s always tomorrow.” Hilda sets her axe down at her feet, flashing empty hands proudly toward Lysithea.

Lysithea dismisses the dark spikes. They become smoke and then air. “Thank you, Hilda, I’ll be in contact soon. The best thing you can do now is leave.”

Hilda is dangling by the finest thread. With a final chaotic smirk, she asks, “I have one last thing. Hey Ashe, did you ever tell your siblings you killed your dad?”

Ashe’s whole body shakes. “There are things we do.” But she speaks to empty space, inside and out. Hilda is gone. The memory is gone. Ashe tries to pinpoint the impression it left, but each time is answered with thorns of pain.

When Hilda’s skipping footsteps echo distantly in the hall, the whole room draws closer in relief.

Sylvain rises from the table for the first time in hours. he doesn’t remember when his ass went numb. it tingles with each step as blood flow finds it. “I take it you _don’t_ want a kiss?”

“This is all your fault.” Ashe slaps him red and it feels good, the smack of her palm on his cheek. No knight is perfect; the ones who are walk only across pages.

Lysithea winces but says nothing. She would have done the same. Letting emotions stay bottled is counterproductive; their seeds grow unpredictable and wild.

“Ignatz, if you’re not injured, leave,” she directs.

Ignatz’s eyes dart among the canvases. Variations on the goddess and one single cleaved image of Sylvain. A magnetism of embarrassment binds him to inertness; he wants to conceal them all with thick cloth. 

In the end he walks between them, an expression of clear turmoil etched on his face.

“I’ll carry them for you.” Sylvain calls after, hurling his legs off the table and at last zipping up his pants.

“I’m gonna need you to stay here for a blood sample.” Lysithea demands.

“How about a tissue sample?” Sylvain looks disgustedly at the length of his muscle lying across the floor. He has a lot of practice feeling woozy shame at what comes out of him, yet this is a new class altogether.

“I’ll see if I can work with this.” With a scowl of displeasure, she uses one of Ignatz’s abandoned brushes to coax a bit of stringy muscle into a vial. “But your blood would help.”

Sylvain stretches. “I know the answer’s gonna be something stuffy and academic, but what’s this even for? And what’s it worth to you?”

“I want to reverse-engineer your fire-bending. That it’s pink, that usually takes metals at concentrations a body wouldn’t have.”

“You want my _flames_? I would feel so _violated_.” He closes his palms into fists, instinctively hiding their source.

“More violated than having her rearrange your guts?” Lysithea swirls the piece of Sylvain she has in the vial and points at his stomach.

Sylvain smiles, recalling his watery orgasm at Hilda’s hands. “It wasn’t as bad as you think.” For some long heartbeats he reflects. “But it wasn’t worth repeating. You don’t think she’d _really_ hurt anyone else, do you?”

“That’s a conversation best answered by you, Ignatz, and this painting of you,” Ashe says, her boots toeing at the torn canvas.

“That’s intent to kill....” Sylvain appraises his likeness. His cheeks choose now to blush at the broadcast of his arousal. Ignatz’s work is seductive. “Once you’ve killed one close friend, I guess merely harming the others is a lot easier.”

“I choose to believe that isn’t true,” Lysithea harrumphs.

Neither know of the distant throbbing in Ashe’s head at the suggestion. The sound of shells cracking exists only in her mind. She keeps it hidden, biting her tongue.

“Just in case then.” Sylvain holds out his arm and doesn’t ask why Lysithea has needles ready. All things considered, impromptu phlebotomy and premeditated surgery are just things he lives with now.

Lysithea’s technique is practiced. The draw is fast. When the new vial is all dark with blood, she wraps his elbow in a bandage patterned with happy faces and horses.

“The cuteness will help you heal better... is the hypothesis we’re testing,” she mumbles. “Now let’s all get out.

*

_Later, Lysithea’s lab._

Ashe stands stiffly, doing her best to avoid the tables full of scrolls, uncomfortable in the parchment-scented place she doesn’t know.

Lysithea swivels on her research stool, her feet hovering off the ground. She kicks at air to turn herself.

“Ashe,” she draws out the vowel hypnotically between past and present, “I bet you want to know what you did. I can give you all of my notes, transcribed straight from your mouth.”

That explains the contents of a leather folder with Ashe’s name on it that rests in the crook of Lysithea’s arm. Ashe Ubert Gaspard, her full name, announced in Lysithea’s meticulous capitals.

“It’s all in here.” Lysithea offers it with two hands. 

With careful fingers, Ashe traces the dried ink of her father’s last name. It doesn’t smudge.

Her focus in her touch, she has only absentminded words to name her aches that are so severe in their needle-pricks of time. “I still know what I did. You took out enough for what’s left to be painful. And I trust my past self— “

“Just take it.” Lysithea drops it horizontally across Ashe’s arms before she can sling a _but_ or _and_. “If you read through these, it would be like seeing yourself in a dream. The pain would leave you, probably.”

“Probably?” Ashe echoes.

“Low sample size.” Lysithea shrugs. “I can say it has in other people I’ve done it to.”

“I was thinking in the opposite direction. maybe I would hurt less if you’d pulled out _more_ memory.” Ashe holds the notes to her head, offering the rest through reverse osmosis.

Lysithea leaves silence to take root between them. To take out more would be mental butchery. If she tried to remove only the Gaspard from Ashe Ubert, Ashe could end up like Ignatz’s canvas.

At last Ashe distills her worries into a high-proof question. What she really burns to know. “Was it worth it?” She shakes the papers in her hands and flings them onto the table, their knowledge too hot and burning for delicacy.

“For you individually, I think so. The part where you became beholden to the knowledge that others had of your actions that you no longer had, well... that wasn’t my intent.” Lysithea strains to keep pity off her face, out of her eyes.

“I was calmer until everyone picked at the memory scars,” Ashe remembers, picking at a real scar itching in sympathy. One on her forearm from late in the war, she doesn’t remember from when exactly. After the first several, she stopped keeping count.

“So it would have been worth it if I— if Hanneman hadn’t left it where Sylvain could read it. And Hilda...”

“Hilda might have known before. She can get anyone to do anything. No, I think it would have been worth it if you had done what you said you would do.”

Lysithea looks down her nose, upwards at Ashe. Both have a toe dipped in a water of anger but neither signals a threat. “I’m not denying that, in a cosmic sense, what happened in that supply room could be attributed to my actions and my... zeal.”

Emotion flares in Ashe’s ears but she watches it pass. In a moment it sinks beneath the surface weather of her psyche. “I’m not going to assign blame. It already happened. But you could say that, yes.”

Ashe runs her fingers along sheets of paper that stick out of the folder.

“You’re right to be mad at me. so... I want to tell you something that no one else knows about me. Consider this an apology.” Even as she says it, Lysithea thinks it feels like hostage-trading.

“That’s very transactional.” great minds.

“As charged.” Lysithea still waits, clinging to the static of expectation between offer and answer.

“There’s nothing wrong with that.” Even annoyed, Ashe understands how Lysithea weighs utility of things. She’ll give Ashe what she thinks it’s worth.

“You can choose not to hear it. I just think... Well, I’m jealous that your brother and sister can forgive you one day.”

The prick of interest puts a flash in Ashe’s eyes. There was never a contest but Lysithea knows she’s won. Ashe opens her hands, a sign to begin.

“I wasn’t always a water-bender, like Alliance nobles usually are. I was born to a fire-bending family. It’s not that rare, with intermarriage, migration, and defection among noble houses, for different kinds of bending to pop up. 

“When I was barely a child, researchers from the empire came and they…” her eyes are distant though her words are close, “They gave me crests I wasn’t born with. Soon after, I found that I could waterbend. I was so excited, at first. It made me special.

“Then my siblings started dying. It’s not instant death when a body rejects a crest, you know. They cried out for me to use fire to save them—to heat the metal in their chains and free them, like you did—but by then I couldn’t. It had dried up in the span of a week. I thought about using water, but a week isn’t enough time for a child to master something like water-bending. What was I going to do, put dew on their chains?”

Her throat fills with a despair-soaked laugh saved for the past. She always tastes salt, reliving this story. In her darkest chapter, sweat and tears were water with more dignity than piss.

“Even when Hanneman filtered the extra crest from my blood, fire-bending didn’t come back to me. I’ve gotten pretty good at water-bending, but it’s like a second language learned late. I’ll only ever be okay at it.”

“Oh.” Ashe schools her expression steady while she puzzles out what Lysithea’s aim is with her recollection. Apologies are for the wrongdoer, yet that was no apology.

Ashe’s instinct is sympathy. Lysithea’s crossed wrists draw her shoulders in; she’s shaped like the negative of an embrace. Is her goal here a hug?

Ashe makes room, widening her stance. Lysithea stomps, as if trying to frighten a bear instead of apologize.

“What I want to tell you is to not let your talents wither before you find yourself needing them.”

“I’ve killed plenty of people in the last five years without using bending.” What a person Ashe has become that the notion of talent is lethality.

“And you just saved one person with it, so for this timescale, bending has a better record than anything else.”

Lysithea pauses to think. The cracks in her exterior rejoin, but the substance behind them has taken a different shape.

 _We were all so young when our lives happened to us_ , Ashe thinks.

“No. no. I’ve done this wrong. It...” Her fingers jellyfish in space. There’s no magic she knows to create oxbow lakes of time, but she can try. “Let me start over. Those events are like a sour morsel I was forced to build myself around. Like an oyster and a pearl. You had your own sour, and I took it away from you. Anyway, I give you my sour. A sour transplant.”

Ashe hears an unsaid _share it with me_. Lysithea doesn’t ask for things kindly. She takes with grabby hands. 

Ashe’s first instinct was right but slant. More than an ask for sympathy, Lysithea seeks a joint floating, commiseration, her guilt as ballast for them both.

Ashe gives her what she wants but can’t have. “I think they would forgive you.”

Rings of thought converge like an eclipse, a wave and its opposite annihilating each other in the crystal-clarity of nothingness. When we speak to others, we also speak to ourselves.

At last Lysithea reclines into Ashe’s side. Her face hidden in her hair, her chin on Ashe’s shoulder. “you think so?”

Ashe creates a little flame, weak as a single match head. A little orange heartbeat. “This is the fire I know. It wouldn’t have saved your siblings either, but it saved mine.”

She thinks of nights half-asleep on cold cobblestones as she pours it into Lysithea’s hands. Lysithea clams her hands around it, but in a breath of heat it vanishes.

“I trust myself. Um. Do you have copies of these?” Lysithea’s notes bob in Ashe’s hand.

“Of course.”

“Then let me do this.”

“No, let me.” Lysithea’s voice is the only still part of her. She beams and shakes with raw excitement. A little spark sits in her palm, jumping like a fish.

Her expression spreads to Ashe like a compass finding north.

Together they hold flames to the notes. The paper catches curls to ash. The leather outside warps slightly in the heat.


End file.
